Josh Brolin sounding ridiculously defensive over a two-year old movie on Jimmy Kimmel:
“They want to criticise it because you think it’s Oliver Stone, it’s Josh Brolin, who people perceive as very, very left wing, which I’m not necessarily. They think it’s gonna be heavy hitting; it’s gonna be, like, a sledgehammer on George Bush and we didn’t do that.
“We wanted to know the guy that never should have been president and probably should have run a baseball team – and been very happy doing it.”
Brolin insists the Republican friends who did see the film were surprised by it: “They were like, ‘It’s kinda sad, isn’t it?'”
The actor has heard that Bush himself saw the film – and liked it. ….
“I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I love him, like, two in the morning in this blue glow of sitting at home and, like, maybe tears coming down his face.
Like, why does Brolin, like, talk like a fourteen year-old girl?
And wasn’t it just yesterday he was gushing like a groupie over Howard Zinn’s smile?
Anyway, if I remember correctly, the real problem with “W.” is that it sucked and that Brolin sucked in it.
Josh Brolin’s plays impersonates Bush in a way that’s off the chart silly and stuck on swagger and nervous chuckle. One-dimensional doesn’t begin to describe it. How could any serious actor or director miss that one of Bush’s most impressive strengths as a politician has always been how comfortable he is in his own skin. Brolin’s playing some other man, someone tightly wound in dire need of Ritalin.
The performance isn’t bad, it’s just … odd.
In a polmic filled with forehead slapping moments, Dick Cheney’s (Richard Dreyfus) speech in front of a Middle East map making the case for war in Iraq is the topper. All that’s missing is a white cat for the Vice President to stroke. Yes, Cheney’s portrayed as a Bond villain plotting the takeover of the world and its oil supplies (I wish).
Second place in the Inane Department is the normally reliable Jeffrey Wright who plays Colin Powell as an automaton of virtue. Powell’s futile but impassioned war room speech warning against the pre-emptive war (with Karl Rove in the shadows behind him) would’ve been a howler of bloated self-importance without the tinkling piano score backing it up, but with it I could’ve sworn I heard the ghost of Stanley Kubrick groan.
Yes, I remembered correctly.